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I know I said in my last post that I’d be back soon, but clearly that didn’t work out. The truth is, I often find it tough to write long-form content such as this about my life. It’s simply not the best medium to represent my workflow at this time. I’m in a period of discovery, and with that comes instability. The things I create and do change rapidly, often with little explanation beyond, “I had an idea and decided to try it.”

So, for now, this blog will be officially inactive. I’ll keep it live, both to preserve the existing content and in the hopes that I can one day return to it. But in the meantime, the best way to keep up with my work is to follow me on Instagram. I’ve also opened up a new Etsy shop for some of my random creations.

It’s been nearly a year since my last post, and in that time so many things have changed. Let’s play a game of catch-up, shall we?

First off, let’s talk about Dichotomy. Ever since my graduation from RIT in May — oh, by the way, I graduated from RIT in May — the Dichotomy team has been sort of scattered. Most of us moved back to the towns we came from, which puts me about 600 miles away from everyone else. Add in the sudden stress of job searching and a dash of unreliable internet connection and it was clear what needed to happen. The Dichotomy project is officially on hold. We have discussed the possibility of re-starting development in the future once the dust has settled for all of us, but for now we have to focus on building our post-college lives.

Speaking of post-college lives, I got a job! For the last eight months I’ve been working at Eight Bit Studios in Chicago as a designer. My duties range from motion graphics to graphic design to front end development. Working at Eight Bit has been amazing so far and I’m really pleased to be here. I am still available for freelance work on the side, however, so don’t fret if you were hoping to work with me on a project.

I made this giant poster for our office. Pretty cool, huh?

I’ve been working on a lot of random side projects lately. Everything from websites to posters to woodworking and 3D printing. I’ll try to keep posting regularly about my random doings but be sure to keep an eye on my dribbble and tumblr pages for snippets of what I’m working on.

I’m also working on some updates to Illogical and how it ties in with my personal work, so keep on the look out for more information soon.

The other day I had an idea for a potential new Illogical product. What if I could find a way to visualize the Earth’s orbit in a way that is both unique and scientifically accurate? I thought maybe I could use some fun math to help me out.

The diameter of the Earth is 7,918 miles. In addition to that, the Earth’s average distance from the sun is about 93,000,000 miles. So my question was this: if two people stood on opposite ends of the earth and aimed a laser at the sun, what angle would their beams meet at? In addition to that, I wanted to get a nice visualization of the math as it pertained to Earth’s orbit (remember, that was the original goal) so I wanted to know what an arc of that measure would look like. By cutting that angle out of a circle, we could get an approximate visualization of how much perceivable curvature the Earth’s orbit has over the distance that the Earth occupies on it. In other words, if you bent a giant wire in a circle around the Sun so that it matched up perfectly with the Earth’s orbit (yes, I know the Earth doesn’t orbit in a circle, but remember we are averaging here), what would the section of that wire that actually intersects our planet look like?

I’d like to show you what happens when art students get bored. We make stupid stuff like this. It’s a table. And it’s on fire. And that’s about all there is to it.

The table in question was originally intended to be the object modeled in an introduction to 3d modeling workshop I was going to give (hence the über simplicity), but I kind of like it better on fire. Especially with half-textured square fire.